Receding Waters Reveal 'Ghostly' Piece of American History Thought Lost Forever
As droughts continue to wreak havoc on California, bodies of water across the state are drying up in dramatic fashion.
One of those receding bodies of water, Shasta Lake, has revealed an interesting relic from World War II.
As the New York Post has reported, the U.S. Forest Service Shasta Trinity Unit found a Higgins Boat that surfaced in the fall of 2021 as the lake’s waters dried up.
The marked numbers on the boat, which read “31-17,” confirm that the boat was assigned to the transport ship U.S.S. Monrovia, a ship with an extensive service record during the war.
According to the Post, the ship acted as General George S. Patton’s headquarters during the invasion of Sicily in 1943.
General Dwight Eisenhower was also aboard the Monrovia during the campaign.
The ship is also thought to have been involved in the invasion of Tarawa in late 1943.
The boat is referred to as “The Ghost Boat,” the U.S. Forest Service said, according to the Guardian.
“It really is quite remarkable how it emerged from the lake with so many stories to tell.”
But how did this little Higgins boat find itself in the middle of a California lake?
No one seems to know.
“The circumstance of its sinking remains a mystery,” U.S. Forest Service said.
They added that “there is more to discover of its history and obviously its time on Shasta Lake.”
The boat will be excavated and transported to a museum in Nebraska, where it will be restored and preserved for posterity.
California’s drought issues are showing no signs of improving as rain continues to be almost non-existent across the region.
This surely means that more secrets of the past will be uncovered as lakes and reservoirs across the west continue to recede.
The Higgins boat in Lake Shasta is surprisingly not the only finding of its kind.
Another such boat was found in Nevada’s Lake Mead just this summer.
That particular boat was used to navigate the Colorado river and was then sunk, according to the touring company Las Vegas Scuba.
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